Only the boldest
and most persistent explorers ever have set foot in its tangled and
miasmatic haunts. It may be twenty years before a living specimen can be
brought out. The gorilla and the chimpanzee are so well protected by the
density of their jungles that they never can be exterminated--until the
natives are permitted to have all the firearms that they desire! When
that day arrives, it is "good-night" to all the wild life that is large
enough to eat or to wear.

The quagga and the blaubok became _extinct_ before the world learned
that their existence was threatened! The giant eland, the sable
antelope, the greater kudu, the bontebok, blessbok, the mountain and
Burchell zebras, all the giraffes save that of Nigeria, the big
waterbucks, the nyala, the sitatunga, the bongo, and the gerenuk--all
will go in the same way, everywhere outside the game preserves. The
buffalo, zebra and rhinoceros are especially marked for destruction, as
annoyances to colonists. You who read of the killing of these species
to-day will read of their total disappearance to-morrow. So long as the
hunting of them is permitted, their ultimate disappearance is fixed and
certain. It is not the way of rifle-shooting English colonists to permit
herds of big game to run about merely to be looked at.

Naturally, the open plains of Africa, and the thin forests of the
plateau regions, will be the first to lose their big game. In the gloomy
fastnesses of the great equatorial forests, and other really dense
forests wherever found, the elephants, the Derby eland, the bongo, the
okapi, the buffaloes (of three species), the bush-pigs, the bushbucks
and the forest-loving antelopes generally will live, for possibly one
hundred years,--_or until the natives secure plenty of modern firearms
and ammunition_. Whenever and wherever savages become supplied with
rifles, then it is time to measure each big-game animal for its coffin.

The elephants of the great equatorial forest westward of the lake region
will survive long after the last eastern elephant has bitten the dust.
The pygmy elephant of the lower Congo region (_Elephas pumilio_) will be
the last African elephant species to disappear--because it inhabits
dense miasmatic jungles, its tusks are of the smallest size, and it has
the least commercial value.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIX

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE GAME OF ASIA

After a successful survival of man's influe